For many years universities had been falling down at the job of coaching humans to assume for themselves and promoting themselves as running shoes for enhanced profits technology. It is an abomination if, as George Monbiot reviews (Who is actually making your picks? It won’t be you, 31 December), they’re helping research into strategies for overcoming resistance to advertising and marketing. We ought to appear to other institutions to offer reservoirs of resistance. They will not be specially set up to fight the “hidden persuaders” that Vance Packard wrote about in 1957, but with the aid of groups who build a network on other not unusual pursuits.

Perhaps the maximum success is the Campaign for Real Ale, which took on the worldwide beer manufacturers who advised us what to drink. My personal metropolis has many pleasant pubs, conventional and cutting-edge, that are obvious centers of resistance and now not just on the beer front. What some will locate greater sudden is that there are a few church groups around that inspire human beings to develop a capability for skepticism, at the same time as helping them to stand up to the effective forces of twenty-first-century global capitalism.

George Monbiot’s warnings about the insidious power of marketing studies being funded by way of publicly funded universities are nicely-made. We ought to take into account that David Cameron becomes inspired through this growing body of research in organizing the Downing Street behavioral perception or “nudge” unit – allegedly geared toward exploiting the better facet of human psychology so one can improve residents’ behavior (which include sending n tax returns on time). Manipulating the behavior of unsuspecting people was a wholly universal premise. Indeed, the principle nudge theorist, an American economist, gained a Nobel prize in 2017, so his work has already had a massive effect on a global scale. At a time while higher training is being commercialized like by no means before, with the economic stakes growing year by way of year, we should provide the best precedence to the ethical scrutiny and manage of publicly funded research and the people engaged in it.

George Monbiot is right to factor up the competitive efforts at the part of groups to govern patron responses. But he is too sweeping in tarring “universities” as a whole as contributing to this method. It is usually commercial enterprise colleges that conduct such studies. Having labored for some a long time in such establishments, I can verify that other than a few lip provider to wider social concerns, commonly in areas such as enterprise ethics, worldwide control or (some factors of) corporate social obligation, the main purpose of most commercial enterprise faculty hobby – and of the good-sized majority of research investment inside the field – is to improve the achievement of person businesses, without regard to wider implications. We want more educational regard, and extra funding, committed to the broad philosophical, social and political influences of the enterprise if we are to see a break at the corroding effect of present-day advertising and marketing techniques. Paul Griseri La Genetouze, France

• George Monbiot highlights an often hidden and insidious factor of modern capitalism. In the early days of capitalism, advertising and marketing turned into used to absolutely make the wider public privy to a product, but with cutting-edge technology and psychological sophistication this has morphed right into an exceptionally persuasive operation, plugging into human – and particularly kids and younger people’s – weaknesses.

I do not forget after I first went to live in East Germany, long before the autumn of the Berlin Wall, how the “grey” truth, so tediously iterated in the west, represented for my freedom from needless and intrusive marketing. I observed it wonderfully refreshing. I could suppose my own thoughts, daydream and simply have a look at the arena of architecture, people’s activities and my entire environment untrammeled with the aid of gaudy, in-your-face hoardings and sexually exploitative imagery. Of route, there have been the ever-present simplistic political slogans, but they were less evident than business advertising and had little, if any, impact on a skeptical populace.

Now it isn’t just hoardings, of a path, but social media technologies that dominate our each day lives and company hobbies plug directly into our brains, growing addictions as pernicious as cocaine or opium. How old-fashioned does the Big Brother idea in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four appear in comparison? John Green London

• George Monbiot is quite proper to bitch approximately teachers doing research that enables advertisers to manage minds. But universities be afflicted by a highbrow and humanitarian scandal a long way worse than Monbiot appears to realize. Most would agree that a right simple aim of academia is to assist sell human welfare by means of the intellectual, instructional and technological method. If this purpose changed into taken severely, and pursued rationally, academia could supply highbrow precedence to the obligations of articulating our troubles of residing, which include our international troubles, and presenting and severely assessing possible solutions – viable actions, guidelines, political programmes, approaches of the dwelling.

Intelligent public schooling about what our troubles are, and what we want to do about them, could be an absolute priority. The pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how would be essential, however secondary. No college within the international is organized alongside those lines. All take the primary priority to be to gather specialized knowledge.

All around the arena universities, of their whole shape, betray purpose and, as an end result, betray humanity. A gift, we do no longer have what we so urgently need: establishments of mastering rationally dedicated to helping us discover ways to make development towards a higher, wiser, greater civilized world. Nicholas Maxwell